The city’s last big Benjamin Franklin Parkway concert was a first-ever New Year’s Eve concert in 2025. Headlined by LL Cool J with DJ Jazzy Jeff, other performers included Emmy Award-winning artist Adam Blackstone and the rock band, Dorothy.
The Parkway was closed off at 6 p.m., with the concert beginning at 8 p.m. and fireworks at midnight. Friends of mine who live in the Art Museum area did not venture out – even via Lyft – but saved their celebrations until New Year’s Day, well after the concert was over.
A bit of history: On December 6, 1969, Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones looked out over the massive crowd at California’s Altamont Speedway and saw the concert security staff, the Hell’s Angels, beating up an audience member. The Angels, who were paid in beer rather than cash to act as security that day, had apprehended a man named Meredith Hunter, 27, who attempted to approach the stage. When Hunter attempted to approach the stage again, this time with a revolver, he was beaten by the Angels and then stabbed to death by Angel Alan Passaro.
The melee, which was captured on film, caused a nervous Jagger to announce, “People, people, let’s be cool!”
The murder of Hunter would come to be known as rock and roll’s darkest day, officially marking the end of the 1960’s peace and love era which had its peak expression only months before at Woodstock.
Rock and roll has changed significantly since 1969, devolving into the wide landscape of rap music where the essential ingredient — muddled words and often obscenities — deliver many different types of messages: liberal, conservative, atheist, Christian. The wide range of rappers in the world would fill a football stadium, from conservatives Kanye West and Christopher “Topher” Townsend to radical left rappers like the late Tupac Shakur, who has become an icon of woke.
In 2018, CNN Politics listed seven hip hop artists “that are making America woke again.” The field is mixed, and while many will say that anybody can rap, not every rapper is able to muster the performance and presentation skills it takes to create a mesmerizing stage presence.
Eminem, for instance, shot to fame in 1999 with his Slim Shady LP. The fifteen-time Grammy Award winning star, rap’s so-called “great white hope,” soon got fat and began denouncing Donald Trump from the stage. Old-time fans walked away from him because he was sounding like everybody else in Hollywood.
The 1969 tragedy at Altamont was superseded by Live Nation’s Entertainment production of the Astroworld Festival in Houston where on November 2, 2021, thirteen people were killed and 300 injured when a crowd surge during the concert caused concert goers to trample one another. Live Nation has a history of safety violations over the past decade. The massive concert enterprise also seems to thrive best in large Democrat-controlled cities where the urban landscape cultivates its own style of rough and tumble lawlessness (conservative rappers — are there any? — need not apply)
How many times can you ‘F-Trump’ without sounding unimaginatively redundant?
Consider Philadelphia.
Philadelphia’s annual two-day Labor Day concert on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, sponsored by Live Nation, has been drawing thousands of people since its inception 8 seasons ago. Called ‘Made in America’ (MIA), when the festival began it was briefly criticized for being “too white” and not diverse enough. That problem — if it ever was one, honestly — has been rectified.
Now one can say that the festival is not diverse enough, even though there hasn’t been an MIA Parkway concert since 2022. And it doesn’t look like there are plans to bring it back.
Since the first MIA concert organizers went to extreme lengths to diversify, rap and hip hop became an essential part of all Parkway concerts but it was rap and hip hop promoted by CNN as Woke Rap (the ‘F-Trump’ syndrome again).
Live Nation’s contention that the MIA festival also included pop and electronic music was an exaggeration. While this latter category of music was given cursory acknowledgment on stage, the bulk of MIA concerts (curated by Jay-Z) featured such artists as Meek Mill, Jay-Z, Justin Bieber (mainly for laughs), Lil Baby (not a shampoo), and a host of other (radical left) rappers most Americans have never heard of.
Proceeds for Philadelphia’s 2021 MIA festival went to the ACLU with other proceeds going to The Reform Alliance. The Reform Alliance is a left-progressive organization intent on eliminating oppressive probation, parole and bail issues. While some of the Alliance’s concerns might need looking into, the bulk of the organization’s focus is aligned with the progressive policies of Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner,
The goal of the Reform Alliance is the replacement of America’s justice system “with a restorative system that is fair, accountable and invested in rehabilitation, support and wellbeing.”
All of this sounds quite benign but also very vague. Under the surface there’s the suggestion that these grand “restorative systems” are still being worked out, with the finished plan ending up anywhere — perhaps on the most extreme end — of the radical left speedometer.
There was a time when the ACLU did some good things but that era is certainly over. The ACLU today mirrors Marxist/Communist models with a social agenda reflecting the beliefs and convictions of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
One aim of the ACLU seems to be the total remake of American society.
Live Nation’s old MIA concerts transformed Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway into a street version of Astroworld with overflow crowds that often spilled out into the surrounding neighborhoods. At one MIA concert several years ago neighbors in the Art Museum area complained of drunk and drugged-out MIA attendees peeing or vomiting on their cars or on their property. Then Mayor Jim Kenney, who loved these outdoor city extravaganzas because of the money they brought to the city, turned a deaf ear to the residents of high-rise condos along the Parkway who have complained about the mayhem and noise created by MIA.
Throughout the year on warm weekend mornings Parkway residents in condos have to tolerate the incessant sounds of people who pound endlessly on drums as if they were the last of the Mohicans. The drummers tend to be one-note home musicians every bit as annoying as those swirls of ATV’s that used to bombard Old City and whose engines can be heard 25 stories up in Society Hill Towers.
In 1969, Mick Jagger claimed he never knew the fatal stabbing of Meredith Hunter was taking place, so he kept on singing “Under My Thumb.”
Who knows whether MIA will be back in Philadelphia this year for another Parkway extravaganza that will send city residents racing out of town.
One thing is sure: if MIA ever returns, it will be accompanied by the ACLU and the Reform Alliance who will troll the crowds with their petitions and sign- in sheets, bringing in ignorant sheep while from behind the microphone audiences will hear the latest dark rap sounds of ‘F---ICE’ or ‘F---Trump.’
